The present invention relates generally to security management, and more particularly to the management of system security in a networked computing environment.
The networked computing environment (e.g., cloud computing environment) is an enhancement to the predecessor grid environment, whereby multiple grids and other computation resources may be further enhanced by one or more additional abstraction layers (e.g., a cloud layer), thus making disparate devices appear to an end-consumer as a single pool of seamless resources. The resources may include physical or logical computing engines (e.g., virtual machines (VMs)), servers and devices, device memory, and storage devices; such as a storage area network (SAN) or a network-attached storage (NAS) solution. For example, information resources, such as data files, databases, image files, etc., as well as components and/or computing resources (e.g., memory, persistent storage, networking systems, etc.) within a cloud computing environment, can be widely distributed. In addition, an advantage of cloud computing environments is that users and developers have tools to enable the creation and utilization of services in a condensed period of time.